Ever since Max Weber posited the ideal-typical distinction between Oriental and Occidental cities in his essays on the economic history of Europe, many historians of the Middle East have grappled with his model. The debate about the existence of the “Oriental” or, more specifically, the “Islamic” city and the validity of Weber's construct have led to the growth of a sizable body of literature on the topic. In this collection of their essays, Masters, Goffman, and Eldem approach this question from a different angle. They ask not so much whether the “Islamic City” exists, but whether there was such a thing as an Ottoman city. Based on their work on Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul in the 17th and 18th centuries, they come up with an answer that can be described as a qualified no.

Rudi Matthee's book has several key problems, which I discussed already in my review. Here I will provide evidence for two main issues that I see in the book. These issues are the limited use of Persian primary sources, and a tendency to make very broad claims based on very limited evidence.

The period I have spent exploring tribal societies in Yemen's northernmost Saʿdah area spans—with interruptions—around fifteen years, and I can hardly imagine a more profound set of changes converging on and in one place. For an anthropologist, these changes are of a political, spatial, technological, and methodological nature, all of which are deeply intertwined.

The study of the history of the modern Middle East has reached the state at which scholars now have access to first-rate monographs, such as this one, even about urban centers as modest as Haifa was during the period covered by this book. This is certainly good news, particularly because books such as this one, and May Seikaly's, which covers a subsequent period of Haifa's history, are comprehensive, well written, and thoroughly grounded in local primary sources. We should be grateful in particular to Brill's “Ottoman Empire and Its Heritage” series for publishing this and other monographs covering the local history of different parts of the Ottoman Empire.

In most Middle Eastern jurisdictions, the applicable family law is determined based on the religious affiliation of the parties involved. Whereas Jordanian Islamic family law has last been reformed in 2001, 2010, and 2019, and the law that regulates the shariʿa courts has been amended several times since 1972, the family laws of Christian communities and the church courts have largely been exempted from this reform dynamic. Based on semi-structured interviews as well as the review of written sources, this article investigates why it is difficult to reform the church courts and even more difficult to reform the family laws of Christian communities, using the Greek Orthodox community in Jordan as a case study. I argue that conflicts within the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem and the fact that the jurisdiction of the patriarchate over family law transcends Jordanian state boundaries have made state-led reform challenging and presented obstacles for Jordanian Christians lobbying for change.

When the State of Greater Lebanon was established in 1920, the Jewish Community Council of Beirut was officially recognized as the central administrative body within Lebanon, and although smaller communities such as Sidon and Tripoli also had their own councils they were consequently made subject to the authority of Beirut. In this context of political overhaul, I argue that some Jewish actors made use “from below” of political opportunities provided by sectarianism “from above”—or national sectarianism—to garner control over all Jewish political structures in Lebanon. But by examining in particular activities in and around the Israelite Community Council in Sidon (al-Majlis al-Milli al-Isra'ili bi-Sayda), I show how and why these attempts to practice new forms of sectarianism were met with resistance, despite connections that tied Lebanon's Jews together administratively in one community.

We continue celebrating the fortieth volume of the International Journal of Middle East Studies with an excerpt from an article of yore recommended by a former IJMES editor.

A joke appearing in the folds of a Cairo-based newspaper published in Italian in 1895 must have fallen flat with Port Said's inhabitants. But the irony was not amiss. The jest suggested that the town, whose toponym could be translated to “happy port” given the Arabic meaning of saʿīd, ought to be renamed “unhappy” due to the sad state of its public services. Readers may have smiled mirthlessly in agreement with the author, who claimed the Egyptian government treated the city “as if it were less than a village.” Many were under the impression that Cairo wanted to scrap this “unhappy happy port” from the rest of Egypt. Continuing the wordplay, British journalist George Warrington Steevens wrote in 1898 that Port Said “would be wonderful if it were not unhappy,” stuck as it was between its riotous past and its doubtfully industrious future. Puns based on Port Said's name must have circulated for a while. Already in 1875, a French author had ironically remarked that this town's auspicious name seemed quite unjustified.

In 1925, the Turkish parliament commissioned a translation of the Qurʾan from Arabic to Turkish as well as a Turkish-language Qurʾanic commentary. This project is commonly misunderstood as an initiative engineered by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) and linked to the radical institutional reforms of 1924: abolition of the Islamic caliphate, prohibition of the Sufi orders, and closure of the medreses. In fact, parliament's support of a Qurʾan translation was not a radical nationalist reform but an initiative supported and executed by devout intellectuals who opposed other facets of Islamic reform in the early years of the Turkish republic.

Despite the weight of his work and his prominence in Arabic public debate, the Egyptian public intellectual ʿAbd al-Wahhab Elmessiri (1938–2008) has not been the subject of much serious study. In this article, I show that Elmessiri's oeuvre offers a rich and creative perspective on both Judaism and Zionism. Studying Elmessiri from the perspective of identity/alterity studies, I argue that his representation of Judaism qualifies as what Gerd Baumann and André Gingrich call “encompassment by hierarchical subsumption.” The article offers an analysis of the discursive logic behind this image of Judaism and its connection to Elmessiri's anti-Zionist agenda, rejection of anti-Semitism, and critique of Western modernity.

The emergence of Islamic television in the Arab Middle East is usually explained as part of a Saudi media empire fueled by neoliberal petro-dollars. This article, by contrast, takes seriously the role ideas played alongside changing political economies in the origins of the world’s first Islamic television channel, Iqraa. Focusing on the intellectual and institutional career of “Islamic media” (al-i’lām al-Islāmī) as a category from the late sixties onwards in Egypt, I argue that Islamic television is part of a broader decolonization struggle involving the modern discipline of mass communication. Pioneering Arab communication scholars mounted a quest for epistemic emancipation in which the question of how to mediate Islam became inextricable from the question of what made media Islamic. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research, I show how the idea of Islamic media involved a radical reconceptualization of the Qur'an as mass communication from God and of Islam as a mediatic religion. This positing of an intimate affinity between Islam and media provoked secular skepticism and religious criticism that continue to this day. I conclude by reflecting on how the intellectual history of Islamic media challenges dominant framings of epistemological decolonization as a question of interrogating oppressive universalisms in favor of liberatory pluralisms.

Over the past decade, historians have finally started listening to the past. Mark M. Smith, an American historian and a leader in this wave of sensory and sound history, has said that historians today are “listening to the past with an intensity, frequency, keenness, and acuity unprecedented in scope and magnitude.” However, scholars of the modern Middle East have yet to join this auditory revolution. Whether working in history, political science, anthropology, or gender studies, they are still largely producing soundproof, devocalized narratives.

During the late 19th century, British supremacy in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean basin increasingly brought the hajj under the surveillance and regulation of non-Muslim powers. With the development of steamship travel and the opening of the Suez Canal came rapid growth in the number of oceangoing pilgrims. Colonial authorities eventually identified the steamship-era hajj as both a conduit for the spread of epidemic diseases, such as cholera and plague, and a critical outlet for the growth of Pan-Islamic networks being forged among Indian dissidents, pilgrims, and the Ottoman Empire. As a result, the British and Ottoman empires engaged in a contestation of sacred space in which the stakes ranged from suzerainty over the Hijaz and the administration of the hajj to even larger questions of hegemony in the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and even dār al-Islām as a whole